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I remember when these murders happened. I was living alone on the side of the road in rural Vermont about 20 miles away from Chelsea Vermont which turned out to be where the murderers lived. The muders seemed totally random and it was a weird time to be living in Vermont, a place where you normally don’t lock the door. Since that time, I’ve lived in the same community, in a different location, and have gotten to know other people whose lives were in some way affected by this chain of events. Now we’re reading this book for our book club.

There are other books about the murders but this is the only one that I’ve read. The authors are Boston Globe reporters who seem to have set up a very deliberate story arc that, while effective, does sort of take a lot of the events out of order and, in my opinion, seems to be overly descriptive in the interest of getting an entire book’s worth of story out of a small but powerful event. I found myself skimming some of the more descriptive scenes because I felt that the authors really needed to try to put you in the place of, say, the high school graduation in a rural New England town and if you live this sort of thing every day it can seem sort of precious and redundant. I enjoyed the read, but I’d like to find another book about a similar topic so that I could see how other people frame and portray the same set of events. The authors very clearly had one narrative that their facts adhered to, I’d be interested in other ones.